


in the fertile ground

by parishilton



Series: foxes mate for life [2]
Category: Big Brother RPF
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Student/Teacher, M/M, Murder Mystery, Pining, References to Knotting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-08-31 23:30:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8598058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parishilton/pseuds/parishilton
Summary: “i was hoping it’d be you,” zach says, shifting from one foot to the other, looking awkwardly down at the grass below. he seems to be unsure of whether or not he’s allowed to say that and, all of a sudden, frankie is livid.





	

**Author's Note:**

> not sure if anyone has figured out where this story is going yet, but tags will be added as the series updates in order to not spoil it.

“alligators,” paul says, his hands clenched tightly on the wheel as they pull out of camp, “fucking monsters. her body was hanging over a tree branch, limp like a fucking sweater hanging out to dry. did you know they climb trees? i fucking didn’t.”

frankie feels nauseous just thinking about it, so he claps paul’s knee gently and squeezes. “i’m sorry, paul.”

paul shakes his head. “i barely knew her. cody, though, he’s had a crush on her for a long ass time. how fucked up is that?”

frankie frowns. he could have guessed that paul hadn’t known nicole well, but to not be physically ill from seeing her body like that, frankie can’t understand it. “why didn’t cody take the ride back with us?” 

“cause he’s a good fucking kid,” paul says, as if this is self-explanatory. when paul realizes frankie looks more confused than before, paul clarifies, “he wanted to be with his friends. he actually does like hayden, god only knows why. i’m sure zach is a wreck, the kid cries when you forget you had plans with him to play golf.”

usually when zach’s name is brought up, he can easily keep a poker face, but this time, it’s different. at the mention of zach’s name, frankie startles. he can see zach’s glassy eyes back at camp, he can practically smell the scent of heartbreak, and then, much worse, the scent of acceptance that frankie didn’t want him.

frankie was more than okay with taking the trip back to west palm beach with paul, then getting dropped off at his mom’s, because there was no way he wanted to be alone in an airport, on his way back to new york, but barely an hour into the excruciatingly chatty ride, frankie’s head is pounding and his forehead is beading with sweat.

paul drums impatiently on the wheel, driving just enough over the speed limit on a bumpy back road full of potholes enough to concern frankie if it wasn’t for his splitting headache. “cody is such a trooper, man, staying back on that bus just to make sure hayden and zach are okay.”

frankie’s eyes slip shut, his forehead resting heavily against the window on the passenger's side. he sees zach’s bare ass through his wet underwear in his head, as zach stands with his back facing frankie. it’s strange, the way he can almost smell zach now, so strong that frankie could almost believe he’s in the backseat.

“frank, you okay, buddy?” paul says, nudging frankie’s arm with unnecessary force. “you don’t look so hot.”

ironically, he feels very hot, with sweat building at his hairline and at the back of his neck. “no, right now i’ll leave that to zach,” frankie murmurs, carelessly.

paul balks, looking confused. “ _what_?” he reaches over and touches frankie’s forehead. “you’re talking nonsense. you’ve got a fever, man.”

frankie knows something is deeply wrong when, after having seen the still-fresh blood shining on the leaves and hearing that paul had actually been the one to find nicole’s lifeless body, he’s actually hard, having to resist the urge to reach down and subtly readjust himself as the tires of the car hit a puddle and water flies up onto the window his face is pressed against.

“find me a motel,” frankie says through clenched teeth, the only thing on his mind being the feeling of zach pressed against him in his bed at camp, practically purring.

paul looks at him like he’s sprouted another head, but frankie can’t stand to be around anyone  - shaking from a feeling unlike his co-advisor or any of the campers had felt - not with fear from the scene they’d all fled, but with _want_.

paul pulls into the parking lot of a dingy-looking motel on two wheels, taking up two spaces, and circling the car to throw frankie’s door open and drag him out. beside the motel is an old gas station with a broken lawnmower sitting on the edge of the property. frankie groans aloud when he thinks about how zach’s shorts had been tented even after they got off the lawnmower at camp.

paul looks at him with concern, mistaking frankie’s groan to be from pain, and frankie will just let him think that. frankie plants his elbows on the desk inside the motel to keep from shaking and rings the tiny silver bell to get someone to come over. he doesn’t even know where the hell they are, besides somewhere between georgia swamplands and florida forest.

frankie goes into a rut without knowing it, sneaking up on him slowly during the long days, eyes raking over zach’s backside, mouth cotton-dry and teeth grinding.

with the motel door locked, knowing he had no neighbors to either side of him, judging by the empty parking lot, frankie presses his sweaty face into the pillow and wonders if he’d pissed off someone in the kitchen staff that day enough for them to slip him a viagra, because this was not normal, and it wasn’t going down. his body was shaking too hard and his head throbbed too much for him to want to touch himself. another part of him refused to on the basis of the tragedy that had just happened.

he ripped apart one of the cheap motel pillows the first night, teeth gnashing, and unable to stop thinking about leaving his room and screwing the first and only person he had stumbled upon since checking in. she had been a middle-aged woman with her prescription eyeglasses on a string, which had hung in a way which aged her face dramatically. frankie knew something was really wrong when he was desperate to jump into bed with someone who was not only a woman, but also one which he had not looked twice at before.

for a painstaking four days, frankie rolls around in damp sheets, the sweat never ceasing. he keeps the window in his room open, but bizarrely, when the room is freezing at night, his sweat just turns cold. he doesn’t touch himself until the second day, but if anything, it makes it worse. he jerks off, wakes up between fevered dreams about zach, and is already hard again.

after four days, his dick is almost sore from oversensitivity. he dreams about what would have happened if nobody had needed to be evacuated from camp. zach would have stayed in his bed, frankie would have rolled him onto his back, thrown his legs over his shoulders, slid into him so slow and stayed so still that zach would have begged him to move. zach would have come entirely too soon because zach would be tighter than anyone who had come before, but would have asked frankie not to pull out. he would want frankie to finish inside him because he would think it would make frankie want him even more, would think that he could trick frankie into falling in love with him that way.

frankie wakes up and his head is foggy with visions of zach’s face when he slides into him. he needs to talk to zach, to hear zach’s voice, but he doesn’t have his number.

frankie’s breath is labored as his knuckles trace his groin. he knows he sounds like he’s run a marathon. he's had cody's number ever since he and paul started going to camp together, so he texts cody to get zach’s number. cody texts back almost immediately. _i don’t think that’s a good idea._ frankie wonders why the hell not. zach is physically attracted to frankie, can’t even help but get hard when frankie shows the slightest bit of interest. frankie was so angry, he started shaking. what business of cody’s was it, anyway? zach is _his_ and he should be able to reach him whenever he wanted. _just give it to me,_  he texts, _i need it right now._

when he gets the number, frankie immediately calls it. it rings six times, then goes to automated voicemail. “ _fuck_ , zach, call me back. you’re all i can think about.” frankie breathes harshly into the phone as he thinks about zach listening to the message later and blushing. “you’re so sexy. you’re so sexy when you’re embarrassed. i should have - _fuck_ \- i should have kissed you in my bed.”

all the while, frankie has a vice grip on his cock to settle his shaking. he wishes whatever this was had just waited until they had gotten to west palm beach, so he could beg zach to meet him somewhere. he wishes zach had answered the phone. maybe he has the kind of parents who don’t let him close his bedroom door so they can monitor what he’s up to.

frankie fantasizes about the scandalized way zach would respond to hearing frankie groaning quietly over the phone, thinks he would be louder on purpose to rile zach up. he wonders if zach would risk rubbing one out in a pair of his basketball shorts with his door wide open, trying to bite his lip to stay quiet. “ _shit_ , zach, i wish you were here. need you to - need you-”

frankie feels the pulse of something altogether unnatural shift beneath his hand, where his groin meets the base of his cock. it’s a ripple so gentle that frankie almost thinks he’s imagined it until it happens again. through the sweat on his brow bone, he looks down and sees the swelling before his own eyes, but he still doesn’t believe it. his dick is somehow marginally thicker than before, but not to the effect of simple biology. it’s never been this thick before and frankie can’t explain it. the nerves have his hands sweating the way they do whenever he takes a date to the top of the empire state building and looks down at all the cars below. his hand slips with sweat over the head of his dick, which feels heavier than ever before.  

frankie hangs up just before he comes and sleeps for twenty-four hours. he wakes up and the sweat on his body is minimal and concentrated under his armpits finally instead of beaded on his head, but he still doesn’t have the energy to shower. his mind is finally, blissfully, clear. he feels like he’s waking up with the kind of hangover that only comes after binging on alcohol for a week.

it’s not until he checks his phone to get the time that he remembers what he did. it floods back to him, the way he lowered himself to the level of almost _begging_ and the way he had given this young kid a glimmer of hope when he hadn’t been firing on all cylinders. he’s not ashamed, but he’s fucking angry. he’s fucking angry that cody didn’t have the common sense to withhold zach’s number. zach, who was probably mourning not only frankie breaking his heart, but also nicole’s death, who was a close friend of his.

 _why the fuck did you give me zach’s number?_ frankie texts, _i just had the worst fever of my life. i was practically hallucinating._ cody replies almost instantly. _it wasn’t zach’s number. i didn’t want you to freak him out again after you were a huge dick to him._

well, frankie thinks, apparently zach was not so embarrassed of what had happened at camp that he didn’t want to tell his best friend. but what poor fucker was going to listen to that voicemail and have something to laugh about for days? _whose number did you give me?_ he waits five full minutes before cody responds.

_it was victoria’s._

cody has some sick sense of humor.

* * *

frankie has bed bugs. not bed bugs in the sense of a parting gift from the previous occupant of his dorm bed like he experienced in his first year of college, but instead, dead crickets that have shown up mysteriously in his bed every morning since frankie got back to florida.

feather-light pressure on his forehead accompanied by the urge to slap his own face is what wakes him up one morning, thanks to a dead cricket. after that, he walks into the only sex shop within a twenty-five mile radius of him that has above a one star yelp review, buys handcuffs with cash, smiles at the cashier, and brings them home to test his theory.

the culprit behind nicole’s death, according to the six o’clock news, was an animal, because of the marks left on her body. they never say what kind of marks - bite marks or claw marks - but there’s no animal capable of killing her that would venture that far from the swamp. frankie knows that much. not even the alligators have ever made it smack into the middle of the campgrounds, not in at least fifty-some years, far before the campgrounds was built.

he doesn't understand why any person would want to hurt a girl like nicole, but he _knows_ it had to be a person, not an animal. he just hasn't thought that it could be possible for it to be _him_ until he starts sleepwalking.

he wakes up every morning and the window in his bedroom is open, though he shuts it every night. one morning he wakes up and there’s dirt all over his bedroom floor like he’d walked outside with wet shoes and trudged dirt into his room, but he would have had to come in through his own window, because there’s no dirt anywhere else in the house.

then, dead crickets. frankie can’t figure out if they got in through the window or if he had somehow collected them in his sleep.

to his knowledge, he had never sleepwalked before nicole had been killed, but he realized soon after that he had developed the ability to. he’s his only suspect in nicole’s murder and he has to know what happened.

* * *

this isn’t the first time frankie has laid in a bed with the feeling of cold metal handcuffs sending goosebumps up his arms as they slide around his wrists, but it’s certainly the first time he’s done so alone, and with the express purpose of falling asleep wearing them.

the cashier had sworn the handcuffs were real silver, though it doesn’t matter to frankie, not unless he’s been turning into a werewolf at night and the silver might prevent that from happening. he supposes he’ll know if that’s the case if he wakes up with burn marks in the morning.

he never sleepwalked as a child, so why now? there’s a part of him that really _does_ think he could have killed nicole.

ariana barges into his room as he’s laying on his back in bed, head propped up on several pillows and his handcuffed hands folded over his chest like a vampire in a coffin, and she promptly gapes when she sees him. “are you waiting for a boy to come over? this is weird. i should go.”

frankie rolls his eyes, thinking of when she was a little kid and had walked around the house wearing his cock ring as a bracelet, blissfully unaware of what it was. “no, i’m not. what did you want?”

“homecoming dress options,” she grins, balancing her laptop on one hand. “liz said i should go as molly ringwald in _pretty in pink_ and get a custom dress made.”

frankie snorts, patting his bed so she’ll sit down. “liz will use those pictures as blackmail one day when you least expect it.”

ariana kneels on his bed, wrenches a pillow out from frankie’s head, and hits him in the face with it. “speaking of blackmail opportunities,” she smirks, “say cheese.” she grabs frankie’s flip phone from his bedside table and snaps a photo. “do i even want to know?”

“i’m trying to see if i still sleepwalk while wearing _these_.” frankie shakes his hands so the metal clinks together noisily.

“not _this_ again.” ariana looks unimpressed. “you’re obviously still going to sleepwalk.”

“why’s that?” frankie asks.

“because you didn’t handcuff yourself to the bed frame, dumbass.”

* * *

after a full week of handcuffing himself to his bed frame and waking up only to a cramped wrist and a hand full of pins and needles, frankie packs his things and heads back to new york. now that he’s sure he had nothing to do with nicole’s death, he has no real leads. he guesses he’s been sleepwalking due to the stress of a camper being mauled to death, but not because he caused it.

he goes back to his old life. he teaches dance classes and improv to kids full time and tries to forget about how fucking surreal and scary it is that he’s maybe losing control of his mind and body completely. first, when he had a fever so strong, he was almost delusional. then, when he started sleepwalking and climbing out of his window at night.

ten months later it’s still on his mind, so he explains the fever to paul, the only person from camp he talks to regularly, choosing to leave out the parts where his dick was hard enough to break wood and maybe somehow _grew_ without any reason to. paul laughs and says he must have caught the flu from a camper.

“those kids fucking swap spit so much, we’re fucking lucky we didn’t catch mono,” paul chuckles.

frankie grimaces. “we would have had to kiss a camper to get mono.”

“yeah...true,” paul says, clearing his throat. “anyway, the fever and the sleepwalking aren’t fucking related, man. what kind of fucking weird shit would cause that, swamp foot disease? the skunk ape? hey, sweetheart!” paul’s voice bellows and frankie has to pull his phone away from his ear. he guesses paul is at the gym and trying to hit on girls again. “do you have any italian in you? no? do you want some?”

strangely, paul actually brings up a good point. the only odd thing that happened to _frankie_ at camp _,_ nicole being killed notwithstanding, was that ten months ago frankie had saved a seventeen year old from drowning in a small patch of swamp water. it was _zach_ who he saved in the swamp. then, when he was feverish, it was _zach_ that consumed his thoughts.

they’re seemingly unrelated instances that frankie’s gut tells him are actually not unrelated at all.

 _zach_ \- short name, short kid - had made anything but a short impact on that summer, if frankie’s willingness to track him down nearly a year later says anything about it. there are plenty of reasons to track someone down who manages to look good in basketball shorts.

zach’s ass is as good a reason as any, but that’s not the reason.

frankie wishes that were the reason.

maybe the key is zach. maybe zach is somehow responsible for all of this. he already blames zach for that fever, but if zach was involved in nicole’s death in any way, and he’s going back to camp this summer, frankie has to be there to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“paul, speaking of camp-” frankie shouts to get back paul’s attention.

“none of us are going back there this year,” paul says, echoing frankie’s thoughts, “all the blood gave cody nightmares for three months.”

“none of you?” frankie hedges, the phone nestled between his ear and shoulder, opening his laptop and hovering over the keys with steady hands. he wonders what his friends in new york would think of him if they knew that his summer plans rested entirely on whether a high school senior wanted to waste his summer going back to a camp in georgia or to just stay home in florida.

paul takes a long pause before speaking in such a manner that frankie can _hear_ his sneer. “you’re _not_ still holding a fucking candle for the kid?”

frankie clicks to book his flight back to florida, jostling the phone so it doesn’t fall off of his shoulder. “what kid?”

* * *

in early may, frankie fills up three suitcases of clothes, boards a plane out of new york city, and traipses back to the house where his sister still lives. close to this time last year, being in his home away from home for the past seven summers of his life caused the most bizarre series of events in his whole life to transpire. this was the place where he began as a rambunctious nineteen-year-old camper and came out of as a fully-developed twenty-six year old camp advisor. up until nicole’s death, the worst thing that had happened at okefenoke was either the christine brecht camper scandal involving the married badminton coach or the time fifteen-year-old paola shea had a nose bleed over the grill during a hot dog eating competition. now it was tainted by death and, though frankie knows this, it feels odd to be traveling somewhere other than georgia for the summer.

on the other hand, this is the first year in seven years that frankie will be with ariana for her birthday in june, and since he missed the milestone of her sixteenth, he’s glad he won’t miss this. she’s overjoyed when she sees him walk through the house with their mother, her ponytail bouncing as she jumps at him, all five feet and two inches of her springing up like a slinky.

when frankie lifts her off her feet, he takes a few blind steps forwards, her body blocking out his vision entirely, and he walks into a set of streamers decorating the doorway. when he puts her back down, he looks at the pink paper streamers that have fallen to his feet. “what is all this for?”

“your homecoming!” she says, eyes twinkling with mirth. “you asshole, you haven’t seen me in almost a year!”

frankie raises an eyebrow. “mommy,” he calls in a falsetto, “ariana is _cursing_.”

joan sits down on a dining room chair, her small black sunglasses still perched high on her nose even though they’re inside, and sighs heavily. “put a sock in it, frankie, mommy is tired.”

frankie presses his lips together to keep from laughing. when he looks back to ariana, expecting her to be equally as amused, he sees that she’s staring at him expectantly, like she’s awaiting an apology. “sis, look, you know that my schedule is chaotic. don’t give me that face.”

joan seems to have acquired a glass of red wine out of nowhere and sips it before interrupting their conversation. “take it easy on our sissy,” she reasons, eyes on her wine, rather than either of them.

ariana rolls her eyes, turning towards their mother and kicking at the pink streamers on the floor with her kitten heel. “i’m fine, mommy.”

“i was talking about frankie,” joan manages to explain between chuckles.

as ariana and joan both laugh at his expense, frankie walks over to the security panel on the wall beside them, finger hovering over the call button, pretending to actually press it. “ _security_ !” he barks into the speaker. “there are intruders in my home pretending to be my family! i’d like them removed _immediately_.”

* * *

_the skunk ape,_ the online article reads, _is a carnivorous swamp-dwelling floridian creature that was first sighted in the sixties._ frankie rolls his eyes. he thinks he would remember seeing a skunk ape, had one existed, sometime within the seven summers he attended camp near the florida-georgia border. that seems far-fetched at best and a sore excuse for a bigfoot copycat at worst. no, the skunk ape doesn’t have anything to do with nicole’s murder, or even frankie’s peculiar fever or sleepwalking tendencies. of course paulie’s help is really no help at all.

frankie continues searching for other abnormal happenings around swamps and comes across the rougarou, a swamp monster that was part wolf and part human, and originated in louisiana. he supposes if he had been a rougarou, and transformed into a wolfman in the night, he would have broken his handcuffs at least once when he had tested them.

that leavs the tales of marie laveau, a voodoo practitioner in the deep south that would use animal hair in her rituals, and frequented louisiana swamps. frankie reads that she was rumored to have died in a lake somewhere in louisiana, so that ends any unlikely connection that could have existed between marie laveau and the okefenokee swamp.

the only thing that really ties any of these strange, southern superstitions together is the fact that they seem to all surround swamplands. he wonders whether that’s just part of the natural appeal of folklore - that these stories must have an origin somewhere eerie and swamps are inherently eerie places - or if there really is any truth to any of it.

but everyone at camp who participated in the obstacle course in the okefenokee swamp _did_ swim in the swamp water - yet only one girl died. what did nicole do wrong that nobody else had? frankie tries to remember every detail of that day - how every camper behaved near the water and the way they swam - but there had been so much roughhousing going on, it was impossible to remember anything with clarity.

the roughhousing had been what caused zach’s nose bleed. could human blood coming into contact with the swamp water for the first time in potentially a century cause something beyond the normal realm of science? if zach is the reason all of this is happening, does that mean frankie has to find a way to stop him?

* * *

“paulie,” a familiar voice calls, “dad says it’s your turn to clean the gutters.”

frankie has been listening to this for fifteen minutes. he now knows which calafiore sibling has dishwashing duty, vacuuming duty, and gutter patrol for the next month. frankie continues to paint a clear coat of nail polish onto his fingernails as the phone rests facing up on his desk. unfortunately, the calafiore family all boast voices that carry, including cody.

“hey, i gotta fucking go, man,” paulie says, having finally returned.

frankie snorts. “i think the gutters can wait for your phone call to be over.”

“no, i got a lacrosse summer program to hit up. gotta get there early and make sure the old broads on the school committee know they won’t have any jurisdiction on my team. i’m not like that last guy. he was a total pussy, according to cody.”

“the school committee?”

“yeah!” paul barks, “but keep your fucking voice down!” frankie stares blankly ahead, wishing paul was there for frankie to smack. “cody doesn’t know that i got this job to keep an eye on him this summer. i told him i needed it for my resume, so dad will finally give me a job managing one of his gyms this fall.”

“do you even know how to play lacrosse?” frankie asks in disbelief.

“nah,” paul replies, sounding annoyed, “how hard can it fucking be? no punching on the field, no dishonorable conduct-” a door slams in the distance and paul laughs, “-and no fucking crying on the field either, rance! you hear me?” frankie jolts in his seat. “anyway, bro, i’ll have to catch you later. i'm leaving now and cody's driving there later-”

frankie supposes he doesn’t really have plans for the day, besides dinner with his mom. “...do you need an assistant?”

* * *

“she just couldn’t say no to me,” paul simpers as they stand in the locker room, “it’s that goddamn calafiore charm, baby!”

frankie rolls his eyes. “that and she said we saved her the trouble of having to make a call to someone who would expect a salary.”

paul frowns. “why the fuck did you agree to be a _volunteer_ assistant coach, anyway? don’t you need money for, like, two-hundred dollar jeans?”

“i already have a job in new york waiting for me,” frankie reminds him, “i’m just doing this to-” he cuts himself off. he really has no idea what to say to cover up the fact that he’s only here to figure out how zach was involved in nicole’s death.

“to help out these kids?” paul smiles widely and claps frankie hard on the back. “that’s fucking admirable, man. you’re a fucking stud.”

as kids start shuffling in, frankie inhales deeply, waiting for zach to walk through the door. he’s not going to let some kid have any impact on him, not when his career expressedly revolves around teaching kids to dance and not giving them the opportunity to act out in his presence. there’s nothing special about zach that would make him an exemption to that, yet his stomach continues to tighten as more kids, including hayden, bang open the door and zach is not one of them.

frankie watches paul introduce himself to the team as cody’s cooler, older brother, much to hayden’s chagrin, all the while wondering where zach was. maybe he was in the bathroom, sick with nerves because he didn’t want to be compared to everyone else who he would soon be training with. maybe he was still in the parking lot, on the phone with his mom, begging her not to make him participate.

“frankie?” paul asks, while waving his hand across frankie’s face slowly, “earth to frank?”

hayden sniggers, earning a glare from cody from across the room. frankie watches as a kid he’s never seen before leans over and murmurs something to hayden, locking eyes with frankie, and getting caught in the act. “ _yeah,_ ” hayden answers softly, “ _it’s the same guy_.”

frankie feels his nerves lift completely, swiped away effortlessly by overhearing one comment. people already know who he is. zach has been talking about him, or at least, _cody_ has been talking about frankie, to explain zach’s behavior, which he assumes must be bad. frankie still holds all the power. how could he forget that? with his eyes still locked with the kid asking about him, frankie winks. the kid pales and looks suddenly to his left and right, as if frankie had meant to wink at someone else.

paul clears his throat, oblivious to the silent exchange happening before him. “frank, before you decided to check out, i was asking you to introduce yourself to the guys.”

frankie grins. “i don’t think that’s going to be necessary.”

he’s met with a mixture of raised eyebrows and impressed shrugs.

paul bends over, throwing one foot up on the bench in the locker room, looking about ready to burst into an inspirational speech lamenting their team’s struggles as the underdogs, like in the movies, though the juniors are merely all here for practice for the fall team and the seniors merely hear for a summer program, simply because paul is an egomaniac, even coming from frankie. paul seems to be channeling every bit of zac efron in _high school musical_ as he possibly can, though paul being distracted does provide frankie with the opportunity to notice paul’s cell phone sitting on the bench, beside his sneaker. he waits for everyone’s attention to be diverted to watching paul before he reaches for it.

 _meet me in the field after_ , he types, _this isn't paul. and don’t bring cody._

he waits for a response to come, for the phone to vibrate, and to be asked _who is this_ , but none of those things come.

* * *

“jesus, frankie.” paul scrubs his hand over his face, slumping against the side of his car as they stand in the parking lot. “i didn’t know you were going to be such a legend around here. what the hell did you do?”

frankie snickers. “not zach, though i’m getting the impression that’s what people think.”

“ _what?_ ” paul bites. “he’s significantly younger than you!”

frankie raises his eyebrows. “you’re significantly dumber than i am, but that doesn’t stop people from thinking we’re friends.”

paul lowers his voice. “did you or did you not sleep with zach?” he asks accusatorially.

“of course not,” frankie answers smugly, “but not because he didn’t want to.”

paul grimaces. “can you fucking stop? he’s like my little brother. i didn’t even know he liked guys.”

“calm down,” frankie says, rolling his eyes. “it’s not like he’s taking it up the ass from anyone. he just had a crush on me.”

paul looks green. “well, that’s my cue.” he opens his car door and jumps in. “you sure you’re alright to wait for your mom to pick you up?”

“what’s the rush?” frankie laughs. “you don’t want to talk about zach taking a big, hard dick, and loving it?”

paul slams the car door shut and turns on his engine. “you piece of shit!” he yells, laughing, over the sound of the motor. frankie steps back and watches as paul peels out of the parking lot, honking loudly as he goes. frankie attributes that more to paul’s napoleon complex than wanting to honk just to say goodbye.

* * *

frankie has been waiting on the field for almost no time at all before zach shows up. on the long walk from the parking lot all the way across the other side of the high school campus to the empty lacrosse field, frankie wonders if zach won’t show. if zach had heard beforehand that frankie was going to be helping paul with the team and skipped out on the introductions in the locker room, with plenty of people present to keep distance between them, why would he voluntarily meet frankie anywhere completely _alone_?

the lacrosse goal is netted, standing tall enough to where frankie can lean against it, and he imagines the soccer team might share it with the lacrosse team come the fall semester. he sees zach walking towards him with his hands in the pockets of his black track pants, making eye contact with frankie only once, then keeping his head low, though frankie thinks he can detect a soft smile on his face.

when he comes closer and pauses a few feet from the goal, frankie eyes him skeptically. he looks even smaller than frankie remembers and, though the logical side of his brain tells him that zach isn’t physically capable of tearing someone’s body apart with his bare hands, frankie has no other leads, nobody else to blame for all the shit he’s been through since last summer, and an itch to place blame wherever he sees fit.

“i was hoping it’d be you,” zach says, shifting from one foot to the other, looking awkwardly down at the grass below. he seems to be unsure of whether or not he’s allowed to say that and, all of a sudden, frankie is livid.

zach is not allowed to say that. everything that’s happened, it’s all zach’s fault. winding up stranded in a motel in the middle of nowhere with the worst fever of his life, that’s zach’s fault. waking up every morning with his bed covered in insects and having no recollection of how it happened, that’s zach’s fault. standing here on this field after volunteering to waste his entire summer in florida instead of finding more work in new york, that’s zach’s fault too. all of his summer plans now gone in order to investigate this kid who is in all likelihood involved in nicole’s murder, yet looks at frankie like he’s afraid of frankie, or what frankie will think of him. zach is not allowed to act like he’s being asked to prom. this is nothing other than business.

“those kids all seemed to know about me,” frankie says, scanning zach’s face for any dead giveaways, and it’s zach, so of course there’s plenty.

with a red face and two subtly-shifting feet, zach looks like a deer in the headlights. “cody tells everyone stories about you and paul.”

“you don’t have any stories you wanted to tell?”

zach bites his lip. “not really. then everyone would know i embarrassed myself in all of them.”

frankie stares at zach, uncomprehending. “you didn’t embellish anything and tell people something had been going on between us?”

zach looks a little pained to think frankie wouldn’t want people knowing. “would that really be embellishing?” his voice raises slightly, so he probably told at least some people that something had been going on between them last summer.

“yes,” frankie says with a heavy sigh, “because nothing happened.”

“well,” zach says, his face scrunching up in confusion, “that’s not really how it felt in your cabin.”

frankie grinds his teeth together, not understanding why zach would be arguing so childishly with him. “well, it felt like nothing to me. it _was_ nothing.”

zach looks caught off guard and frankie notices that it’s the first time that his feet have stopped anxiously shifting back and forth. “oh.” zach expels a quiet breath, looking stunned.

it _would_ figure that for zach, ten minutes of cuddling would be blown up in his mind as something more than what it was. he was inexperienced when it came to dating in general, moreso, frankie would guess, when it came to guys, and unless he’d gotten a boyfriend in the last ten months, frankie wouldn’t be shocked to know that zach could have been fixated on those insignificant ten minutes for every _second_ of those past ten months. for some reason, the idea that zach had been daydreaming about being cuddled by him incessantly for _months,_  while frankie had been analyzing merely the facts surrounding nicole’s death, made frankie’s confidence surge again. “so, what _did_ you tell people?”

“nothing, really. cody made a lot of jokes. hayden too. people guessed.” zach looks startlingly uncomfortable, like he could crawl out of his own skin at any moment and _wanted_ to, just to be anywhere else but with frankie right then. frankie realizes he’s probably just broken zach’s heart again, but he still has something else to tell zach, and he’s not about to get sidetracked by any potential waterworks.

“that night,” frankie pauses, “did you have anything to do with what happened?”

zach shakes his head in disbelief. “with nicole? she was my friend.”

“that’s not what you said when you were spending the night in the nurse’s cabin,” frankie says with suspicion, “you said she wasn’t your friend because she was a total nerd.”

zach scowls, like frankie is rewriting history, when he’s only using zach’s real words against him. “so you think i would _kill_ her because she was a dork?” his lip curls around the word _dork_ , like it’s nothing short of a placeholder for something kinder, like he wants to say she was a sweet girl, and he hopes nicole had known that he thought so. frankie doesn’t know what to make of it. zach’s never been a great actor, so he doubts zach is lying. “nice, frankie,” zach tacks on with a hurt tone.

frankie can already tell this is not the meeting zach has expected. maybe zach had seen the text, clenched his phone pitifully, praying it was from frankie, thinking he was going to apologize to zach for how he treated him that night in camp, or maybe even for never contacting zach since then.

but that’s not why frankie is here. even if zach misses nicole and would never have consciously done any harm to her, that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have without knowing. frankie’s sleepwalking only proves that.

frankie reaches into the back pocket of his jeans, his fingers digging for the cool metal of his handcuffs. he wants to be the one to prove zach has something to do with nicole’s death, with frankie’s painfully agonizing fever, with the sleepwalking that only the handcuffs had prevented, and there’s only one thing to have zach do.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! let me know if you've figured it out yet or if you're interested to see where it goes.
> 
> virgotrixie.tumblr.com


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